¨Chopped Onions¨ by Nicholas Gitomer

Steeped in feelings untold, allowing vomit to unfold in space. The long and lucky steam bath. Sitting in a well-proportioned chair at night, with the eyes open looking straight at the ceiling, feeling.

The walls were just as they should have been. She was not sure if this even mattered. The dog was begging for its meal in the hallway, but she was busy. The dog’s bleak, dissolute whine reminded her of Eliot’s unreal city, still churning in the dissolute fizzle of her thoughts.

            She had too much to think, yet was only now beginning to disassociate. The connecting threads between love and hate were all too constructed for her to take seriously. A stack of unread books lay toppled all about an unpacked valise.

            The bathtub was filling slowly with her vomit. She wished she could ignore it, but of course could not. She rotated the knob to turn the faucet off, but a dribble of puke still trickled out methodically. The beautiful blue sky that she could see through her garret window did nothing to coax her out of the mood that she found herself stuck in, impermeable and lax.

            The headlines that day spoke of love and war and little else besides. “The depression, deary,” she had remembered Joan Blondell declaring from the mercury-tinted screen just a few days before, projected upon an otherwise unremarkable wall in a room filled with unremarkable people like herself, coming away from tawdry everyday existence to find themselves in a room, communing and separate.

I sit at the edge of my bed letting spit dribble out of my mouth and onto the unremarkable floor. I do this every Saturday, because if I were not to, well then I would go out and if I were to go out, then I would spend money, and if I were to spend money—well, you know what happens then. I did not want to contribute to the manifold stratifications of the capitalist system, a system that I know has none of my interests in mind. All I want, because of capital, is riches. And I know that I cannot spend myself into having riches. Truth be told not even business could save me now.

            I don’t know if I want or even need the business, or just to keep busy, so I just walk out, keep walking to the end of the rail line, right where the cars turn around, and walk in. I board the train merrily, but the conductor demands of me his fare. I have no interest in paying him. He understands, I can tell, and so to respect his sympathetic denial I do not board. The train putters off.

            I walk over to try my luck at another company’s line. The conductor does not ask me for change, and so I ride off into the sunset of Saturday afternoon.

The day had started all wrong, a crash of lightning and a huge storm coming through town. Josephine knew this might happen, the barker on the street announced it the morning before. Now she awoke, head swimming with left over alcohol seeped in her veins from the night before. She was glad that imbibing was legal again, but it seemed she was perhaps a little too glad. Depressing the lever after puking in the water closet, she found she needed to shave her legs to let her interior sense of well being continue in the least inoffensive manner. She meandered across the street to the Rexall Drugstore and picked up some rubbing alcohol. When she got home she tried a sip of the stuff, and then rubbed it on her legs, up and down, feeling the occasional prickle of hair caught on the roughness of her hands. She was depressed that her hands had become so rough; as a result of the economy she was forced out into the workers of the world. She did not know or realize how so many of the people in the world took to this way of interacting. She was building the world, yet at the same time rejected by the world she struggled to build.

            She reached around for some slick hand lotion and moisturized her skin, trying to let the feeling of the oil soaking into her be felt as sensually as possible, for it was one of the few good feelings which she still had the pleasure of enjoying. It made Josephine very happy and pleased to know that she was still capable of becoming happy and pleased, even though there was no chance of her spending much money on those financial pleasures that used to be of such importance to her. 

Rubbing herself with lotion was a regular occurrence, just as regular as when her husband—who had just finished a long day working on the public restroom in the park for the WPA—got home and demanded dinner. It was not uncommon for Mark to be so demanding. It was quite normal, although it was degrading for Josephine, who wanted a more liberating lifestyle, perhaps as a dancer or artist. She did not know, of course, how to become either of those things, all she knew was that it was what she wanted, and yet she did not know quite why.

One day in the paper she saw that she could begin a course by correspondence. Dipping her iridescent silver nib into the pool of thick black, she tried to write back, but could not find the words. As quickly as her thoughts, the ink in the shiny beak-shaped vessel dried up. She could not have felt more used. Not even if she if she had placed herself in a bottle to be drunk up hastily by one of the men in the bar that she escaped to once, and fantasized about going to many nights after.

Oh, she decided she did not know what she was making such a to do over. Her life was just another illusion that she would gab on about. She knew that how she viewed herself could not change, even as her actions changed. She would always be that docile little squirt whom Mark would never ever give a spittle of equality. It was hard with Mark, but it was even harder when he came home so filled with demands that it seemed her subservience would be his only pleasure. She could think through her escape, but it was rarely enough thought for her to act upon.

She took out the slab of meat from the ice chest and let it thaw halfheartedly. The meat wishes to be a cow again, she thought. She chopped her two carrots, put them in the water, and started to wait for the cold water to boil over the old brown stove. It took about 15 minutes, and when the water started the meat was still somewhat icy. So she dropped it in. She chopped in the remaining half onion, and with a wooden spoon gestured halfheartedly toward making a stew, although by the time she gave up, most all the flavor had boiled out.

Mark was not happy about this, not one bit. He wanted to grab Josephine by the hair, but respected her far too much for that. He did not want to hurt her. But in his deeper consciousness felt that there was a pulsating desire to do something that could not be forced. It just sat there like deadweight, making him wonder what he might do if only he had the chance. It worried him.

There was little that he could revel in from that moment onward. He took out his timepiece in the middle of the long dark mahogany of the banquet hall that he found himself in and glanced at it, unsure of what his next move would be. He let the whisky bottle topple, and let his social critique of Josephine burrow into what was around him. There were no interested parties for his declarations of war against the bourgeoisie. Nobody had understood him sober, so he was unsure why he thought they might listen to him drunk. Mark toppled out of the hall and started walking home, back to Josephine. It was late, and he felt alive, and then he leaned over and vomited on the sidewalk, attracting stares from the neighborhood homeless.

            When he finally reached his home, he found Josephine in the water closet, almost keeled over, wobbling face first over the tub. Startled, he took two steps back and wondered what his next move in life would be. Surely, he could not live with someone who was capable of becoming this, a mammal huddled in the wilds of their bathroom.  It seemed so classless, not even worthy of his valorization of the proles. He walked into the closet and withdrew his hammer, which he dropped out the window. Then he went to bed.